As data management applications become more advanced and complicated, the physical tracking of an application in a network storage system becomes increasingly difficult. Conventionally, once an application has been successfully provisioned by the administrator, there exists no convenient process to determine which storage components and protocol components are utilized by the application. For example, where a specified number of volumes and LUNs are designated to act as storage for an exemplary application, after provisioning the application, the network storage system does not provide which volumes, LUNs and igroups are in use by the application. An igroup is a logical named entity that is assigned to one or more addresses associated with one or more initiators. Typically, tracking the mapping between storage and application is the responsibility of the application administrator.
Because the network storage system does not track the mapping between the application and the storage components in use by that application, the network storage system cannot provide any application level reporting. Thus, the network storage system is unable to report how much storage capacity is in use by the application, or how many IOPS (“I/O operations per second”) are being consumed by the application.
The present disclosure is susceptible to various modifications and alternative forms, and some representative embodiments have been shown by way of example in the drawings and will be described in detail herein. It should be understood, however, that the inventive aspects are not limited to the particular forms illustrated in the drawings. Rather, the disclosure is to cover all modifications, equivalents, and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope of the disclosure as defined by the appended claims.